Saving streamed video to hard drive

[kasfig]

Dear forum members
On some websites you can click on the link to view onscreen video clips etc , although the option to download such video clips isnt given - can only watch them. Please does anyone know if there is any way to capture such video eg the ones at the following linkhttp://www.jw-media.org/index.html so that they can be saved to disk then viewed offline at leisure. I only have diallup internet.
Any help would be appreciated. thank you
ian

[Richard_G]

Read the sticky https://forum.videohelp.com/topic270338.html

[xiaofan]

this is the streaming url from this page:
http://www.jw-media.org/vnr/4172323223/428262.htm

rtsp://media.jw-media.org/opi/4172323223/428262.wmv

[kasfig]

Thank you so much for obtaining this url. Please can you tell me the method you used to find it so I can find others similar. Also please can you kindly inform me what I have to do if I wish to download the video file or , it that is not possible, record the streaming of it.
I only have diallup internet.
Kind wishes
Ian

[Squash]

@kasfig,

I usually get these types of files out of my cache, but my usual methods didn't work with this for some reason. Anyway, here's my current fallback method, which is free and pretty easy to do:

Get Orbit downloader (with reviews) from here:
http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/Orbit_downloader/1163729355/1
or here:
http://www.orbitdownloader.com/
It's about 1.7 MB.

After it's installed, go to your video site. On that page, if you want, e.g., the "Georgia Victim's Day in Court" video, click on that link. In the next page, hover your mouse over the realPlayer screen. A small Orbit window will pop up showing the words "Get it". (You don't have to play the video). Click on the little down arrow and select "Get Streaming Media File". A "Create New Download Window" will pop up. It will show a URL of "http://www.jw-media.org/vnr/4131637241/236362.rpm" and suggest a file name of "236362.rpm". Click OK. This file is actually a small (54 byte) text file which you can open in Notepad. The contents are the URL of the actual video: rtsp://media.jw-media.org/opi/4131637241/236362.rm . Open the Orbit window from the system tray, click "New" and paste that URL into the download window and click OK. It will suggest the filename 236362.rm. When it finishes downloading you will have a Real Media file of 6.3MB that you will be able to play in your player of choice. Should take you about 20 minutes to download if your dial-up is like what I had back in the day.

The file played fine for me after download using Media Player Classic (real alternative); Also in The KMPlayer, but I had manually added the real dlls to it (KMP) some time ago.

Orbit can also download videos from Youtube and such places directly. That's simpler than your situation since there's no rtsp involved. It just downloads directly. By the way, the hovering thing works great for downloading Flash games from web-sites to in order to play offline if you're into that sort of thing. That's mainly what I use it for. I only use Orbit in Internet Explorer, although it also works with Firefox, Maxthon and Opera. 98% of the time I use Firefox and have a different download manager I use there.

You can turn off browser monitoring and the P2P stuff in Orbit's preferences if you like. Might not be a bad idea if it starts popping up and bothering you, or tries to get part of your bandwidth for P2P, I don't know, don't use it much.

If you don't want to use Orbit, I was also able to find the URL and download the file using Replay AVI, but that costs money.

I'm sure there are a dozen other ways to do this, and hopefully you'll get some better ones from the folks here. Best of luck to you.

[xiaofan]

Thank you so much for obtaining this url. Please can you tell me the method you used to find it so I can find others similar. Also please can you kindly inform me what I have to do if I wish to download the video file or , it that is not possible, record the streaming of it.
I only have diallup internet.
Kind wishes
Ian

hi
i use a program called url snooper to sniff out this url
url snooper is a freeware

[kasfig]

Dear Squash/xiaofan
Thank you for your invaluable assistance.I did manage it with orbit! however playback of the .rm files was fairly poor with (a) sound fading away then returning (b) the video was stuttering with distortion. Please does anyone know if I can download the original source files on their website intact also any other suggestions would be appreciated
thank you
Ian

[kasfig]

What I noticed is the method squash recommends supplies me with the .rm file to download and although this works the quality is poor. the file xiaofan located was on the other hand a .wmv file which presumably would playback better . However I dont know how to locate the wmv file and would appreciate more information please.
Ian

[Squash]

@kasfig,

Weird. I went back and played the Orbit-downloaded .rm file. Sure enough, there were several audio dropouts and some video freezes and glitches; while the file I downloaded using Replay AV looked fine (as good as it did when viewing it on the web site, anyway). I did a quick MD5 hash on them and they didn't match. Then I looked at the file sizes: Orbit=6,616,959 bytes; Replay AV=6,969,028. About a 5% difference. MediaInfo reported a length of 4min 5sec for both, and they both played to the same ending (the Orbit file wasn't truncated).

I then downloaded the file again, this time using Net Transport. File size was 6,967,296 bytes. It looked as good as the Replay AV file I downloaded earlier. I then downloaded it once more using Orbit again. The file was small again at 6,618,078 and still had the glitches.

My advice would be to find the URL with Orbit, then download using Net Transport (I'm assuming you don't have Replay AV). You can get the last freeware version (1.87) at:
http://oldversion.com/program.php?n=nettransport

That's what I used. The later versions listed there are functional but will nag you for money. 1.87 handles rtsp fine.

As far as the Georgia video goes (and that's the only one I saw), it looks like the first minute (and a few later scenes) were shot poorly on black-and-white videotape about twenty years ago, while the modern-day talking head interviews in the last few minutes are very good quality for a 240x180 Real file. The quality looked the same viewed on the web site as it did when I played back the good (Replay and Net Transport) files.

As to the differing file sizes, I suppose it might have something to do with the quick splash at the beginning of the video where it says on the RealOne player screen "Intel Optimizers Streaming Web Video". I googled it and came up with an Intel site saying that "Intel® Streaming Web Video software, an integral part of the RealOne Player, offers additional optimizations to media encoding and decoding at all connection speeds, so that every user can experience the pleasure of rich multimedia over the Internet." I guess you might see a slightly different video each time you watch it from their site depending on how it decides to optimize the decoding based on the quality of your connection/downloader. But I don't know, it doesn't seem that it would effect a file you download rather than view from the site, unless the rtsp streaming thing has something to do with it. It's a mystery to me.

Orbit has worked perfectly well for me on binary downloads in the past.

Maybe you can find a wmv file somewhere. Good luck.

Edit: In case you haven't seen it, Guns1inger's post here:
https://forum.videohelp.com/topic330999.html#1713274
sheds a lot of light on stream-downloading problems.

[xiaofan]

What I noticed is the method squash recommends supplies me with the .rm file to download and although this works the quality is poor. the file xiaofan located was on the other hand a .wmv file which presumably would playback better . However I dont know how to locate the wmv file and would appreciate more information please.
Ian

u save this wmv stream with vlc player
open network stream>at the section rtsp/mms>type in the rtsp stream url>then check the "save" box>browse for the output file location>ok